rediscovering the joy

Today provided one of those "in the groove" studio sessions that make all the days of slogging worthwhile.  On days like today, things work.  Instinct, tempered by experience, takes over.  Curiosity replaces habit, experimentation overcomes fear, the possibility of what may come mitigates judgment of what is.


It has been a pleasure, over the past week, to have the energy to be present in the studio even for short periods of time.  Rather than fret about being unproductive (a mindset that I need to get rid of anyway), I was just grateful to be there.  I am focusing on seven larger pieces that I am going to finish before I work on anything else. Today I got entranced by clouding over three of them with whitish mixtures, then using rags and scrapers to reveal lower layers.  Contrasts emerged: of dark and light, of vertical and horizontal, of straight and curved, of mechanical and organic.  On all three panels, these are intermediate layers, and creating them served the significant purpose of getting past being stuck, of getting past layers that had become too precious to "mess up" but too premature to consider as final iterations.


The image above is one of the three.  All are from the "aerial" series that I began last fall (see posts from last September), and have been hanging untouched since October.  The length of time elapsed somehow has allowed me to break from the representational versions into pure abstraction, to keep the compositional aspects that I like but push forward toward something else. I won't know what that is until I get there, but I like the way it is developing.